Wiktionary:Beer parlour/2014/July

discussion rooms: Tea room • Etym. scr. • Info desk • Beer parlour • Grease pit ← June 2014 · July 2014 · August 2014 → · (current)

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Category for all lemmas again

Previous discussion: Wiktionary:Beer parlour/2014/January#A category for all words or lemmas in a language

The previous discussion seemed to have general support, so I would like to make this change, but there are a few details I'd like to ask about first. We can either have just a category for all lemmas, but nothing else changes, or we could split off all "form" categories into their separate tree and have another category for non-lemmas (which may not be all that useful in the end?). A third option would be to have a category for lemmas alongside a category for all terms in a language regardless of lemma status. However, this last option could also be achieved by mentally merging the lemma and non-lemma categories, so this does not have much added value over the second option. —CodeCat 11:34, 1 July 2014 (UTC)

I prefer the idea of having a per-language category with all words (not just lemmata/headwords), rather like the way the Official Scrabble Words is presented. When I've used Index:English in the past — of course, it's years out of date now — I've wished it had all words and word forms. Equinox ◑ 13:25, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

I think we should have both: one category for all words, and another category for all lemmata. Fr.Wikt and De.Wikt already have categories for all words in each language. Both categories would have many uses. A category of all words would be useful for scrabble players, and for finding entries in the event that we needed to (a) make some change to all words in a certain language, or (b) examine all words in a certain language to see which of them met a certain criterion (e.g. used an acute accent, if we decided that they were all actually supposed to use a macron). (On De.Wikt I used to use the "all words" categories to look for words I didn't recognize, check Google Books and other dictionaries for them, and 'RFV' them if necessary.) A category of all lemmata would be useful for finding words to alliterate, and would also probably be more useful for any other practical purpose, for highly inflected languages where inflected forms would otherwise swamp the lemmata. Both categories would allow Wiktionary to be used like a paper dictionary, where all words can be seen in alphabetical order regardless of POS. - -sche (discuss) 16:22, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

Would a category for all lemmas, and another for all non-lemmas also be ok? That way, you could still look through all words, by searching through both categories. —CodeCat 16:34, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

No, I think there are advantages to having a category that already contains all words, vs having to merge two categories oneself. And I don't actually see a benefit to having a category for all non-lemmata at all, besides that it might provide a more up-to-date count of "form[-of] definitions" than WT:STATS does.
It's also worth noting that a category for all words will be simpler on a philosophical level, and presumably also on a technical level, to implement than a category for all lemmata, because for the "lemmata only" category we will have to wrestle with questions like: are Template:alternative spelling ofs lemmata? Are Template:standard spelling ofs lemmata? What scalable way is there to know which category to use for entries that only contain {{head|foo}} with no POS set? What scalable way is there to know which category to use for entries like messages (q.v.)? Etc, etc. Whereas, anything with {{head|en}} can go into the "all words" category. - -sche (discuss) 16:58, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

It's more that if we have a category for lemmas and all words, then every lemma in every language will have two more categories added to it. If we split them, it will only be one. As for the question of what is a lemma, I think it's relatively simple: if it would probably be listed as a lemma in a paper dictionary, we would do the same. My intention was to create separate category trees for lemmas and non-lemmas, Category:English lemmas and Category:English non-lemma forms. The former would contain Category:English nouns, Category:English verbs etc, while the latter would have Category:English plurals, Category:English verb forms and so on. I would consider an alternative spelling a lemma, because it is the lemma form of a word, and would presumably be found in a paper dictionary with a "see (other lemma)" notice. —CodeCat 17:31, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

FWIW, De.Wikt and Fr.Wikt both use their equivalents of Category:English language as their "all words in English" categories. We could either follow that model, or come up with a separate category, like Category:English words. - -sche (discuss) 16:58, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

A plea for more scrupulous patrolling

Rather sloppy content has been slipping through RC patrol recently. I have found some through second-hand monitoring pages like Special:UncategorizedPages and Special:Shortpages. Apparently User:SemperBlotto has been inactive lately, which means that someone else has to do what he has been doing. I urge all sysops and patrollers to visit Special:RecentChanges more often.

On request, I can grant rollback and patroller rights to trusted regulars. — Keφr 06:56, 2 July 2014 (UTC)

Rollback and patroller rights AFAIK have in the past been done at WT:WL, requiring two admins' input, not one.​—msh210℠ (talk) 05:55, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

Given the lack of interest, this question is kind of academic anyway, but: Wiktionary:Beer_parlour/2013/October#Purplebackpack89 Rollback request. And for some (if not most) users listed at Special:ListUsers/rollbacker the rollback or patroller right has been granted without any process at all (just because Stephen sees someone undo a lot of edits). Of course, for me an autopatrolled flag (which is granted at WT:WL with input from two admins) is a prerequisite here. And given that I am announcing this in public, and it can be undone in case someone disagrees with my judgement, I think it should not pose a problem. — Keφr 06:49, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

Sounds good to me.​—msh210℠ (talk) 07:40, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

@Kephir Please make me a patroller. I don't promise anything, but becoming the patroller will create the temptation for me to actually patrol. Let the patroller flag be removed from me as soon as anyone disagrees. --Dan Polansky (talk) 09:00, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

Granted. — Keφr 09:09, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

Wait, Dan doesn't have the mop? If he doesn't, he should. Purplebackpack89 15:02, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

He shouldn’t be an administrator if he still can’t deal with editors peacefully. I don’t think that he’s merited patroller rights either. --Æ&Œ (talk) 18:59, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

To be clear, I am hardly a big fan of Dan's, but given his, shall I say, very critical attitude to other people's editing, I doubt he is going to abuse the "mark as patrolled" button too much. About the rollback button, I am less sure. — Keφr 20:08, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

AEOE, If dealing with editors peacefully is a criteria for adminship, there are some admins who should have their mops taken away. Purplebackpack89 22:49, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

Too bad SemperBlotto drove away all the new users that could have picked up the slack :P Kaldari (talk) 08:38, 13 July 2014 (UTC)

Converting WT:Information desk to monthly pages

Moved from Wiktionary:Grease pit/2014/July#Converting WT:Information desk to monthly pages

Can we do this now? The last time this was proposed there was some contention that new users might be confused by the monthly pages system and post things to the wrong page. However, I cannot recall a single such incident, so this seems to be a non-issue. Shall we switch WT:ID to the monthly page system as well? The benefits are quite obvious.

— Keφr 21:14, 1 July 2014 (UTC)

There are plenty of examples of people (and in some cases the "+ (add section)" button itself—see [1]) getting confused and mistakenly posting to the main page rather than the monthly subpages, e.g. [2] and [3]. (There are also examples of people posting to the wrong monthly subpage.) However, I no longer feel that this is much of a problem. - -sche (discuss) 22:44, 1 July 2014 (UTC)

Is this worth even asking the question. The page doesn't get very big and shows no signs of growth AFAICT. DCDuring TALK 23:31, 1 July 2014 (UTC)

Yes it does. --WikiTiki89 23:35, 1 July 2014 (UTC)

I think all these were submitted while MediaWiki:Common.js was broken. So assuming it will not break too often, we are rather safe. — Keφr 05:13, 2 July 2014 (UTC)

This is a WT:BP question now, since we know we are technically capable of it. --WikiTiki89 22:49, 1 July 2014 (UTC)

Yes, I see. The method used for BP would work for ID, but not for request pages without further complications. DCDuring TALK 00:28, 2 July 2014 (UTC)

• I definitely oppose this until the concern expressed in WT:GP#Bare_subpages_as_destinations_for_discussion_section_links? is addressed. DCDuring TALK 11:38, 2 July 2014 (UTC)
  • DCDuring: your stance now? — Keφr 08:11, 5 July 2014 (UTC)
    • My concern was apparently mistaken. DCDuring TALK 11:26, 5 July 2014 (UTC)

It looks like -sche is for it, DCDuring has been convinced(?), and Wikitiki89 seems kind of supportive. One more supporter and if no one objects I go with it. — Keφr 13:32, 5 July 2014 (UTC)

• I oppose this. The benefit that I can see is no need to archive the page anymore, but the page is low-profile enough that archiving is not really a problem. The subpaging seems less intuitive than having a single page. --Dan Polansky (talk) 15:52, 5 July 2014 (UTC)
  • I think one of the reasons it is "low-profile" is that nobody wants to visit it, because it is so annoyingly large. (See WT89's diff above.) — Keφr 16:01, 5 July 2014 (UTC)
    • I don't think so; the information desk is a rather unimportant page, especially compared to Beer parlour, so it gets low traffic; nothing to do with the size. As an aside, you said "I knew I could count on you." in the edit summary. If you want to say such things, be enough of a man and put them in the discussion, or, better yet, drop that juvenile behavior. --Dan Polansky (talk) 16:37, 5 July 2014 (UTC)
• How about automating the current archiving method by archivebot.py (docs)? There will need to be slight (and probably good, I'd say) changes, though; the month headings need to go, and archiving will be done section by section, not all sections in a period at once. For an example, see ArchiverBot working on [4]. I can volunteer to run it, if there is interest. Whym (talk) 10:53, 6 July 2014 (UTC)
  • Not workable in my opinion. We have rather few bots, and for all I know, there is no one who can afford to run a bot full-time. And even if, they would probably prefer it to handle mainspace tasks. Also, I never liked Wikipedia-style archives. With monthly pages, you know that if you started a thread in one place, it stays there, unless expressly moved. — Keφr 13:34, 6 July 2014 (UTC)
    • Just to clarify, I am an operator of the archive bot for two other wikis. It costs almost nothing to me to add one wiki. Whym (talk) 16:05, 6 July 2014 (UTC)
      • And who will replace you if you stop running it? (Which is another problem here. High rotation and little staff.) — Keφr 16:43, 6 July 2014 (UTC)
        • (Just responding to "if you stop running it" for the record, not objecting to the other concerns Kephir and -sche noted) My bot uses Tools Lab. [5] Co-maintainers are welcomed. It could also be useful for archiving user talk pages. Whym (talk) 03:09, 7 July 2014 (UTC)

Asking User:Æ&Œ, User:Equinox, User:-sche, User:Angr, User:Stephen G. Brown for further input. (Anyone else is also welcome.) — Keφr 16:43, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

• I have no strong opinion on the issue one way or the other. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 19:13, 6 July 2014 (UTC)
• I also have no strong feeling about monthly subpages. In the past, I opposed converting the Information Desk to subpages, out of concern for teh noobs, but as evidenced by my comment above, I no longer feel that people posting to the main page rather than the subpages is much of a problem, given how easy it is to move threads. The suggestion that a bot could archive threads on an individual basis is interesting, but the number of pages on which that might conceivably be useful is small (BP, GP, ID, ?TR?), and I think the benefit Kephir notes (of knowing that if you started a discussion on the July subpage, that's where it's staying) outweighs the small potential benefits of per-thread archiving. - -sche (discuss) 19:29, 6 July 2014 (UTC)
• I don’t have a strong feeling about it. It gets very little traffic, so I don’t think it matters either way. —Stephen ^(Talk) 03:29, 7 July 2014 (UTC)
  • In the last archived batch, ID had 16 threads per month on average. Which seems rather typical, and is not that small in my opinion. The Etymology Scriptorium often has fewer topics.

  Anyway, what we have here seems to be three "welllll, sure, if you want to" (WT89, -sche, DCD), one oppose (DP), and two strong lacks of opinions (Angr, Stephen). I am going to convert it now. Revert me if you give a shit. — Keφr 09:38, 9 July 2014 (UTC)

New Word of the Day feed

Featured Feeds for Word of the Day are now available: rss, atom. If you have a suggestion to better format the feed, I'd like to help implementing. Otherwise, enjoy. :) Whym (talk) 15:30, 2 July 2014 (UTC)

I just set up a FWOTD feed, when should I expect it to appear? Also, it would be nice if the feed item contained the actual word for its title. I already know how to set that up, but it requires running a bot over WOTD/FWOTD pages, which I am too lazy to do right now (basically, the same way we solved the problem with context templates). Otherwise, wooooooo! — Keφr 16:00, 2 July 2014 (UTC)

Feed names need to be added on the server side; see gerrit:136316. Should FWOTD be added for all Wiktionaries or only for English Wiktionary? Whym (talk) 11:19, 3 July 2014 (UTC)

I have no knowledge of other projects having a FWOTD. — Keφr 11:21, 3 July 2014 (UTC)

Ok, I have made the request in bugzilla:67563. Whym (talk) 11:02, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

And it has been resolved: [6][7] Whym (talk) 09:32, 11 July 2014 (UTC)

Recent "Tbot" entries

I've been finding a few entries here and there that are tagged with the {{tbot entry}} template that date to 2013 and 2014. They had redlinked categories, and I created a few of those categories using the {{tbotcatboiler}} template before I realized that these were for new entries.

Not that I have anything against the type of entries Tbot used to create, but if we're going to be doing this sort of thing again, we should change the documentation so we're not listing someone who's no longer here as the contact, and talking about how things are different now that it's 2007. Chuck Entz (talk) 07:44, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

If these entries are not by Tbot… where do they come from? — Keφr 13:36, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

See this. One user making a few. I'd ask User:Liuscomaes. --Type56op9 (talk) 00:37, 9 July 2014 (UTC)

Template:abbreviation-old

Hi,

Does the {{deprecated}} headband is still available on that template? The template seems to be very used and no replacement is proposed. — Automatik (talk) 15:48, 7 July 2014 (UTC)

The replacement is to use a real part-of-speech header like "noun" or "verb". —CodeCat 16:06, 7 July 2014 (UTC)

What would be the replacement for IANAL? — Keφr 16:08, 7 July 2014 (UTC)

Did you even look at the entry? :) —CodeCat 16:09, 7 July 2014 (UTC)

Oh, me stupid. Previous time I checked, the header was "Acronym". But truth is, even "Phrase" does not seem very fitting. — Keφr 16:13, 7 July 2014 (UTC)

Well, in any case, the replacement is whatever header you would use for the fully spelled out form. So if "I am not a lawyer" is a phrase, then so is this. If not, then this needs to be changed, but I don't know what into. —CodeCat 16:15, 7 July 2014 (UTC)

And for the categorisation? {{en-noun|-}} doesn't seem to be correct for Mbps, neither {{en-noun}} because there is no inflection for this word. — Automatik (talk) 17:12, 7 July 2014 (UTC)

{{en-plural noun}}? (Which I still think to be a stretch.) — Keφr 17:15, 7 July 2014 (UTC)

I don't think, because we can say 1 Mbps. — Automatik (talk) 17:19, 7 July 2014 (UTC)

I guess it's safe to say that it stands for both "megabit per second" and "megabits per second". --WikiTiki89 17:33, 7 July 2014 (UTC)

{{en-noun|Mbps}}? — Keφr 17:35, 7 July 2014 (UTC)

Thank you, I used it. — Automatik (talk) 14:43, 8 July 2014 (UTC)

"Definitions" header in Chinese entries

Apparently, people have been adding this header to Chinese entries instead of part-of-speech headers. But I recall that there was no support for this in the previous discussion. Why is this being done anyway? These entries should be fixed. —CodeCat 11:58, 8 July 2014 (UTC)

Can we just have a real vote on it? Otherwise people are just going to keep going back and forth. DTLHS (talk) 21:53, 8 July 2014 (UTC)

Because the validation of a language-specific header does not require consensus by vote (Wiktionary:Entry layout explained/POS headers#Other headers in use). It only needs the agreement between editors who regularly deal with such entries. The "definitions" header is no different from the "Han character" header in use in the hundreds of thousands of Chinese character entries (e.g. 坉). Wyang (talk) 03:23, 9 July 2014 (UTC)

Inventing a new part of speech header for languages where it's appropriate (I've done this too, I added the "Relative" POS for Xhosa and Zulu) is not a problem. It's a very different story when you're introducing a new header to remove part-of-speech information altogether. That is my objection here. —CodeCat 11:33, 11 July 2014 (UTC)

Regardless of bureaucracy, what exactly is the reason for replace POS headers with ===Definitions===? --WikiTiki89 13:54, 11 July 2014 (UTC)

I oppose "Definitions" header in Chinese entries, now as before. Nothing to do with "bureaucracy"; it has to do with civilized methods of government with which people of certain backgrounds are obviously not acquainted. --Dan Polansky (talk) 11:04, 13 July 2014 (UTC)

Abbreviated Authorities in Webster

I have recently discovered the Abbreviated Authorities in Webster Table, and, noticing that a few of the early entries have been linked to Wikipedia, I have been adding a few such links myself. It's interesting, though there are occasionally mismatches of dates (should the Wikipeida date be moved in?). But it's a bit inconvenient for navigation. I feel that the table should be divided by initial letter. If this seems to be generally agreed upon, is it something I would need to do myself or is it something that should be done by a coding whizz ? —ReidAA (talk) 08:08, 9 July 2014 (UTC)

Excellent! That table could be quite useful in resolving some of the {{rfquotek}} entries.

I started manually splitting the table by initial letter. It is not hard. It just requires copying the wikitable formatting surrounding the "W" or Y" headers and inserting it in the appropriate place in the undivided table.

What might be a great help would be adding links to Wikisource, Google Books, or Project Gutenberg versions of some of the specific works. As an example I did so for Hawking and Hunting. To make sure that the work is useful we should extract from the XML dump a list of how often each authority is used within {{rfquotek}}. DCDuring TALK 10:12, 9 July 2014 (UTC)

The table is now initialised. I've done a bit more wiki-referencing some of the authors. --Catsidhe ^{(verba, facta)} 12:23, 9 July 2014 (UTC)

Thanks. A dump run would help us see which authorities were actually in use, so, for now, we may as well just pursue what is interesting. DCDuring TALK 14:01, 9 July 2014 (UTC)

As we would want to use this to source citations, the best forms of a work to link to would be those that allowed search at once of the entire range of the authority in question. Wikisource often breaks the work into chapters, which is unsatisfactory for search, though arguably good for linking. It is not so handy to have to download the work to search it. DCDuring TALK 14:22, 9 July 2014 (UTC)

Proper nouns

I just came across Bible and Qur'an, which are labelled proper nouns. But at the same time, these have plurals and can take an indefinite article. I just read through w:Proper noun, which suggests that real proper nouns (or proper names) can't take indefinite articles nor have plurals. If they do, then they're not proper nouns, but refer to a class of things rather than a unique entity. The article uses "Toyota" as an example that can be either: the company itself as a proper noun, or a car made by the company as a common noun. In this sense "Bible" is a common noun because it's a book that many copies can exist of. It doesn't act grammatically the same as other book or story titles, whether old or modern. Compare for example "Odyssey", which takes a definite article like "Bible", but doesn't normally have an indefinite article: a Bible versus a copy of the Odyssey, not *an Odyssey. So I wonder what kind of criteria we should apply to proper nouns on Wiktionary, and whether we shouldn't consider relabelling some. —CodeCat 18:33, 11 July 2014 (UTC)

Are given names not proper nouns? They can be pluralised: "All the Jameses in the room raised their heads.", and they do not seem to have a distinct meaning in the plural. — Keφr 18:44, 11 July 2014 (UTC)

(e/c) In particular, we currently label personal names as proper nouns, while simultaneously admitting (in many though not yet all entries) that they pluralize. Ditto country names (Germany : Germanies, Germanys, America : Americas, France : Frances). - -sche (discuss) 18:46, 11 July 2014 (UTC)

These words can be both common and proper nouns. Compare the following sentences:

1. The Bible says to honor one's parents.
2. Jack read the Bible.
3. Jack put the Bible he had just bought under his pillow.

In the first sentence, "the Bible" is indisputably a proper noun, while in the third, it is indisputably a common noun; in the second, however, it can be interpreted either way. --WikiTiki89 19:01, 11 July 2014 (UTC)

In cases such as Bible and Qur'an, I think we should include both POS sections, which is what Bible already does. — Ungoliant ^(falai) 18:54, 11 July 2014 (UTC)

Yes, in the case of books, I think including both sections (Proper noun, and Noun) is best. In the case of personal names, on the other hand, I think including two sections would be unjustifiable; as Kephir notes, the singulars and plurals have the same sense (differing only in number): "one Richard" means one person named Richard, "two Richards" means two people named Richard. Whether that means it would be better to relabel all personal names plain nouns, or live with pluralized proper nouns, I don't know. - -sche (discuss) 19:07, 11 July 2014 (UTC)

"One Richard" is a common noun. "Richard" by itself is a proper noun. However, I think it would be overkill to create common noun sections for every name. --WikiTiki89 19:14, 11 July 2014 (UTC)

We could also just call them all nouns, couldn't we? We could keep the category if needed, but just use the normal "Noun" header. —CodeCat 19:34, 11 July 2014 (UTC)

(@Wikitiki) I don't necessarily disagree that "Richard" can be a proper noun, but I note that whatever parts of speech "Richard" can have, "Richards" can also have. The very reason that given names' definition-lines are italicized is that they are in most uses non-gloss; "and then Richard arrived" means "and then a person named Richard arrived", not *"and then a male given name arrived". An exception would be a hypothetical use like *"not long after the first scribe began to spell the adjective which had been hart as hard, the change spread to instances of the word in compounds, and with that, Richard had arrived", where "Richard" really would be a proper noun meaning "a male given name" — but NB Richards could (equally hypothetically) be used the very same way, e.g. *"and when 'd'-final words began to pluralize with '-s' rather than '-es', Richards arose". - -sche (discuss) 19:36, 11 July 2014 (UTC)

Mentioning a word is an entirely different story. I was not referring to that at all. I also disagree that the plural exists as a proper noun (except in cases where a group of people who are all named "Richard" are collectively named "Richards"; e.g. Richards are coming for dinner, where "Richards" refers to a specific group of people). --WikiTiki89 19:48, 11 July 2014 (UTC)

FWIW, here's how de.Wikt handles it: common names are common nouns, e.g. de:Angela's POS is "noun - first name" and de:Fritz has one POS "noun - first name", another "noun - last name", and a third, labelled "noun", which covers in one section the slang uses that our entry on Fritz split into a "noun" and a "proper noun" section. When a name is defined as referring to only one specific person, e.g. de:Archimedes, it is labelled "noun - proper noun" (but contrast de:Platon). - -sche (discuss) 19:36, 11 July 2014 (UTC)

[e/c] A basic distinction is between proper names (of specific entities, eg, "The White House", "Mack the Knife", "Germany", "The Federal Republic of Germany", "Deutschland", my late dog "Hayek" [short his full name "Friedrich Augustus von Hayek"]) and proper nouns. CGEL (Huddleston and Pullum) hold that ""Proper nouns, by contrast, are word-level units belonging tho the category noun. Clinton and Zealand are proper nouns, but New Zealand is not." and "Proper nouns are nouns which are specialised to the function of heading proper names. There may be homonymy between a proper noun and a common noun, often resulting from historical reanalysis in one or other direction." Their examples are sandwich and Sandwich and rosemary and Rosemary.

Our L3 header "Proper noun" is applied both to terms that serve as names of specific entities and to "nouns which are specialised to the function of heading proper names". Even a term such as White House, which is often considered the name of a specific entity, ie, a proper name, can be shown to be attestably made into a plural. Are the uses of White House to be taken as nicknames for the specific entities Roosevelt White House or the Franklin Delano Roosevelt White House?

Whether in a given case we have under the L3 header "proper noun" a proper name or a proper noun (in the CGEL sense), there is no reason not to show plurals, if attestable. Showing a word like Bible as both a common noun and a proper noun seems fine as the common noun meanings are not entirely predictable from any of the meanings of the proper noun and are attestable, but both common and proper noun meanings are likely to be pluralizable, some attestably so. DCDuring TALK 20:09, 11 July 2014 (UTC)

Reading all of the discussion here, I wonder if things would benefit from an approach like the German Wiktionary, with all of them treated as nouns. Our header structure is different, so it would not fit in exactly the same way. So how about relegating proper name-ness to the actual definition line? For given names, we already have a template to do the job, and for others, the definition already implies properness in most cases. So there's nothing that the header "Proper noun" really adds beyond what the definition already tells the user. It would also allow us to list plurals without problems, while labelling the real proper names as uncountable, and we could also merge Noun and Proper noun sections together in entries when the distinction is not so clear anyway (like in Bible). Furthermore, we need to distinguish nouns that are used without the definite article (such as names) from those that are used with it. There is nothing in the current Bible entry that indicates this to the user. —CodeCat 20:59, 11 July 2014 (UTC)

Uncountability, as we use it, is not the same as not having a plural, though many use {{en-noun}} as if that were true, either through lack of understanding of uncountability, not reading the {{en-noun}} documentation, or being defeated by it. The problem would seem to be that we use "uncountable" both in reference to mass nouns, specific entities, and nouns whose plural form is the same as the singular form. If we could find attestation for expressions like "too much/little White House" (which we probably can), that wold show White House to be uncountable in the sense of mass noun.

Nothing in a template should per se prevent us from making a decision to show plurals for things that appear under the proper noun header. We would just have to revise {{en-proper noun}} and search instances were the plural shown by the template ("tail") did not conform to usage ("dog").

OTOH, none of the OneLook dictionaries call (the) White House a proper noun. (Most call it a noun; some seem to dispense with PoS labels.) We could either take that as an indication that we have bitten off more than we can chew or that we are making an un-lemming-like advance over other dictionaries.

Use with the is usually grammatical information (eg, no the in attributive use; the used to emphasize that a named entity was the famous one of bearing the name), but may also be sense-level information (examples to follow).

It seems to me that we are still some distance away from having a sufficient shared appreciation of the issues involved in altering the thousands of English proper noun L3 headers, let alone those in other languages. DCDuring TALK 22:10, 11 July 2014 (UTC)